Blablacar

BlaBlaCar is building a global transportation network out of empty car seats - Quartz. Call it the 21st century version of hitchhiking: BlaBlaCar is a peer-to-peer marketplace for open spots in cars across Europe.

Unlike American ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft, BlaBlaCar caps the price of the ride based on distance and the cost of fuel in that country. The average ride is 200 miles and the average fare is less than $25. BlaBlaCar was born in 2006, when Stanford student Frederic Mazzella wanted to go from Paris to visit his family in the French countryside and couldn’t find a train—nor an easy way to share a car on Craigslist. (The name comes from rating yourself on your level of in-car chattiness from “Bla” to “BlaBlaBla.”) Every month, one million people use the service, now operating in 12 countries, to share a car. BlaBlaCar’s fee model is structured to avoid a plague of the sharing economy—fights with established industries that don’t like being disrupted.

Capping prices reduces the experience of ride-sharing to one of simple economics. [Best Of FrenchWeb] Ils ont fait l'actu du Web français cette année (épisode 4/4) - FrenchWeb.frFrenchWeb.fr. Après Deezer il y a deux ans, c’est Blablacar, spécialisée dans le covoiturage, qui lève 100 millions de dollars, soit 73 millions d’euros.

Aux côtés d’Accel Partners et ISAI, les investisseurs historiques qui avaient investi 7,5 millions d’euros en 2012, c’est Index Ventures qui est entré au capital de la start-up aux 8 millions de membres en juillet dernier. Blablacar veut donc concrétiser son ambition mondiale. Le service est aujourd’hui disponible dans 12 pays en Europe et plus à l’est, notamment en Allemagne, en Ukraine, en Pologne et en Russie. L’entreprise, qui a par ailleurs acquis 3 sociétés précédemment, prévoit une implantation en Amérique du Sud et dans les pays à plus de 50 millions d’habitants, en conservant le même positionnement: les trajets longue distance, à savoir 330 km, pour 20 euros en moyenne de coût d’utilisation. Les Etats-Unis ne sont pour le moment pas dans la roadmap de Blablacar. Do Things that Don't Scale.

July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale.

A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. [1] Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one.

Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. Fragile Fire. BlaBlaCar Raises A Massive $100 Million Round To Create A Global Long Distance Ride-Sharing Network. In what is the largest VC round in a French startup of all time, BlaBlaCar just raised a $100 million round led by Index Ventures, with existing investors Accel Partners, ISAI and Lead Edge Capital also participating in the round.

Previously, Deezer raised a $130 million round from Warner Music Group’s owner Access Industries, but it wasn’t VC money per se. “Our ambition is to go further than what we have today, even though we still need to consolidate what we began,” co-founder and CEO Frédéric Mazzella told me in a phone interview. “At this point, we could either try to optimize our business to become profitable, or we could invest with this proof of concept to expand now and become profitable later.” I’ll let you guess what the team chose. BlaBlaCar is a marketplace where you can find a driver who is driving from one city to another and book a seat in advance. Today’s news is also a great signal for the French tech ecosystem for two reasons. It is one of Index’s largest deals to date. BlaBlaCar Raises A Massive $100 Million Round To Create A Global Long Distance Ride-Sharing Network.